faq to read/write ini files? about faq HOT 2 OPEN

Interesting! I always had thought that ini was unspecified and thus a parsing nightmare depending on what program or person created the file. This looks doable, but I clearly need to familiarize myself with ini a bit more to understand any corner cases.

If anyone is interested in implementing this or is familiar enough to talk on behalf of ini, I'm all ears.

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Yeah, I expect that there's some skew possible due the lack of standards, so I'm perfectly willing to guess that this is arbitrarily hard to get exactly right for every possible version.

A quick look at other code that does this perhaps to help the next person along:

• PHP function parse_ini_file(): https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.parse-ini-file.php
• Python 3 configparser(): https://docs.python.org/3/library/configparser.html
• "simple INI parser in C", inih: https://github.com/benhoyt/inih
• C# parser: https://github.com/rickyah/ini-parser

Of these the last, ini-parser, perhaps has the most flexibility in dealing with the existing variation in file types, and https://github.com/rickyah/ini-parser/wiki/Configuring-parser-behavior gives you some idea of the degrees of freedom that have evolved in response.

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